The Role of Active Mobility for the Promotion of Urban Health

In the debate on the issue of designing spaces for ‘slow’ urban mobility, this paper emphasizes the importance and centrality of the human-centered approach through the observation of the relations that are established among people, technological systems and constructed environments in order to design according to anatomical and metric needs (anthropometric view) as well as to the needs linked with perception and cognitive processes (anthropocentric view). Two levels of interface in the person-system relationship have been identified, the “individual space”, where internal variables impact the “user system” (factors related to the psycho-physiological perception of space), and the “prosthetic space”, where external variables influence the “environment system” (factors that influence the capability of the architectural space to become physiologically and behaviorally prosthetic).